Tagged: Wikipedia

How NOT to treat an agent who rejects your work (aka take care how you use social media, always keep the nutters’ addresses, and get a dog that bites).

Another biography of Jack Kerouac, this time from Joyce Johnson, whose feature in Publishers Weekly includes some valuable observations on life writing, e.g., ‘I feel that writing a biography should be the process of discovering a life rather than trying to prove a thesis’.

Poor Naomi Wolf. Not only has Vagina been described as the ‘Eat Pray Love of private parts’, but it’s been censored in the iTunes store. It’s just a word, folks – and I thought it was one of the acceptable ones. And she’s also under fire from some (some) feminists. But she’s fighting back in the Guardian. (Know how she feels. I remember the week we did feminism in Critical Theory at Naropa, and I got into trouble for asking about working women left to look after the babies. I was essentialist, apparently. I definitely wasn’t going to do a whole semester of Feminist Theory after that; the discussions seemed to get very anecdotal very quickly. The risks of scholarship that involve identity politics.)

Last weekend I was bemoaning the cliché of the gay elf in fantasy fiction. (Okay okay, I am sure their authors’ GBFFs love them. And it’s not that prevalent. But it has cropped up enough in my reading for me to wince a bit.) Anyway, a fresh perspective in fantasy from the Los Angeles Review of Books: Arab-American and Egyptian fantasy novels that make us rethink the ‘casual orientalism’ of the genre. (Still think the Dothraki are pretty fabby, though.)